A Back Road

In 1884 Hassam was 25 and back in Boston after his first trip to Europe, and Boston was an unusual place to be a young landscape painter. For years its collectors, encouraged by the painter William Morris Hunt, who had worked beside Millet in France, had been buying the French Barbizon painters, men who treated plain fields and farm tracks as subjects worth a whole canvas. This picture takes that lesson somewhere bolder. The rutted road starts right at the bottom edge, so you stand among its pebbles, holes and weeds, and it winds uphill toward a lone man on a wagon under big white clouds. The Brooklyn Museum points to the daring layout and the heavy, loose brushwork as things still unusual in American painting at the time. Hassam signed it in the lower left corner and added the year, 84.